A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A bunch of John Christopher's books are getting reprinted as ebooks. He's a very uneven writer but his better books are well worth reading if you're okay with male-centricity - The Tripods, obviously, but also the Sword of the Spirits trilogy. His worse books, like Sweeney's Island/Cloud on Silver and Wrinkle in the Skin are some of the most jaw-droppingly misogynistic books I've ever read and that's saying something. (Also racist, but sadly not the most racist books I've ever read.) And some are just plain weird, which is always a plus in my book.

Sadly, Kindle has not yet reprinted the Nazi leprechauns.



Empty World, one of his many apocalypse books, features contagious rapid aging. At first children and younger teenagers are spared, and I thought it would be an "adults die, kids are left to make a new world" book. Then the children start dying too. By the two-thirds mark, there are only five survivors that we know of, and one is insane and one, believing he's all alone, commits suicide the day before the others would have found him. This book is dark.

The last third is very odd. Neil, the protagonist, finds two girls living together. They seem to be doing fine, but he doesn't agree and demands that they leave London and go to the country with him. Things go very, very bad between the three of them, leading to an ending that is weird and abrupt but oddly powerful. (This is a minority opinion. Amazon reviews were mostly "WTF? The book just stopped!)



Neil hooks up with one of the girls, Lucy. The other girl, Billie, who I read as being in love with Lucy, is jealous and angry. She also doesn't like him demanding that they uproot their lives and do what he wants. Neil can't stand Billie, and Lucy is stuck in the middle. Finally, Billie stabs Neil! He survives and runs off with Lucy. They realize that they can either run away together and leave Billie absolutely alone in the world, or go back for her and try to work things out.

In the very last line, they go back.





Wrinkle in the Skin is another apocalypse book, genre: giant earthquake. I DNF'd/skimmed it as it takes my second-place prize for Most Ridiculously Unrealistically Grimdark Apocalypse Reaction. First place is the book (IIRC Ashfall) in which a giant volcano erupts and people resort to cannibalism the next day. If you can't hunt for canned goods or just fast for one day before roasting babies in the town square, you just really want to roast a baby.

In this one, a giant earthquake kills most of the inhabitants of Guernsey. Literally ONE DAY LATER, when no one has any idea how widespread the earthquake actually was, some random dude has rounded up the women and begun raping them with the intent of quickly impregnating them so he can found a dynasty with himself in charge. The narrator is mildly put off by this, but not enough to do anything about it; he evaluates all women by attractiveness and agrees with the rape dynasty dude that the first one he found and raped is a "slut." The rape dynasty dude discusses forming a rape roster and keeping an eight-year-old girl for later sexual use when she's slightly older; the narrator is mildly put off but doesn't object.

At that point I started skimming. The narrator, accompanied by a young boy who is not considered a rape target because John Christopher cannot conceive of men being sexually victimized, goes on a trek across a former ocean bed in search of his daughter, a student a London. This part is pretty cool though, hilariously, they cannot conceive of eating raw fish so just leave perfectly good fish because they lost their lighter. These dudes are not exactly dynasty-building material is what I'm saying.

They find that England has also been devastated. The narrator meets up with a woman who delivers a "It's a man's man's world now" monologue in which she explains that she needs male protection because she has been raped in like eight separate incidents by different rapists, and was also raped by the men who "protected" her. After rape # 4 or so, I think I would try striking out on my own and avoiding men as much as possible, as there is plenty of canned food around.

At that point I gave up. It's too late now but I would really like to tell John Christopher that 1) you cannot extrapolate the behavior of soldiers in a war zone toward civilians on the enemy side to the behavior of random civilians to each other immediately after a natural disaster, 2) the day after a natural disaster is waaaaaaay too soon to found a rape dynasty, 3) raw fish is delicious and even if it wasn't, when you're starving you eat what's available so so much for your grim realism that allows for rape dynasties but not raw fish, 4) once things have devolved into a rapefest free for all, boys are getting raped too and eventually you, yes you, will land on the rape roster.